"
... Next on CNN & TIME, historian David Irving and the
Holocaust. Some of his views on the subject may surprise
you...

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHARLES GLASS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Do you admire Adolf
Hitler?

IRVING: What a strange question.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: ... when CNN & TIME continues.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SHAW: Welcome back to CNN & TIME.

Upon touring the Nazi concentration camps in the closing
days of World War II, General Dwight D. Eisenhower urged as
many people as possible to view the atrocities. Eisenhower
feared that if the world looked away, sooner or later people
would come along and question the stories of Nazi brutality
-- a chilling prophecy, especially when you consider the
landmark libel case over Holocaust denial that began last
week in Great Britain.

More now from Charles Glass in London.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GLASS (voice-over): Many people call British historian
David Irving a dangerous man.

DAVID IRVING, HISTORIAN: I'm most puzzled by that word
dangerous. Dangerous, to my mind, is somebody who goes
around throwing bombs or setting fires. What have I
endangered? What have I been a danger to? The latest book I
wrote, I wrote the entire book in fountain pen.

GLASS: Although he has no degree in history and is self
taught, David Irving has written has more than 30 books on
the second world war. Prominent historians have applauded
Irving's meticulous research and his discovery of documents
that had alluded others.

IRVING: Hitler's private secretary gave me this, which is
ultimately unique. It's the only self-portrait of Adolf
Hitler which was known to have survived the war.

GLASS: He has never been interested in teaching.

IRVING: You can go to Hitler's war.

I'm far more interested in writing what I find in the
records, and if I find something in the records that offends
against human sensibilities, I still write it, because
that's the way I see history.

GLASS: He has been banned from entering Canada, Germany,
Italy, South Africa and other countries that make it illegal
to deny certain historical events. This is Irving in 1992,
shortly before Canada deported him.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

IRVING: According to the evidence that I have seen, there
was no gas chambers anywhere. The evidence that we have been
shown, the aerial photographs, the eyewitnesses, it's all
very spurious indeed.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GLASS: Because of his reputation as a dedicated
researcher, his critics say he is more of a danger than the
Nazi sympathizers who traditionally deny that Adolf Hitler
killed millions of Jews.

DAVID CESARANI, DIR., WIENER LIBRARY: David Irving, I'm
afraid, should be treated as someone who is beyond the pale
of respectability.

GLASS: The director of Britain's largest Holocaust
library, history professor David Cesarani, charges that
Irving uses his prestige as a historian for questionable
purposes.

CESARANI: This is someone who may at one time have done
excellent historical research. But someone who addresses
neo-Nazi rallies, someone who dedicates their life to the
ideology and movements of the far right, can no longer be
taken seriously as a scholar.

GLASS: David Irving has written for a far-right
newsletter and has addressed extremist audiences in the U.S.
and Germany. His critics see him as part of the extremist
movement. He says no one else will give him a platform for
his views.

Abraham Foxman is the director of the Anti-Defamation
League in New York.

ABRAHAM FOXMAN, DIR., ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE: This is his
way to make a contribution to the fueled debate. He -- some
people do it by wearing uniforms, some by getting on the
Net, some by lighting, you know, fires, some by throwing a
brick, and some by posing as a historian dedicated to the
truth in order to deliver that message.

DEBORAH LIPSTADT, PROFESSOR OF RELIGION, EMORY UNIV.:
Anti- Semitism.

GLASS: Deborah Lipstadt is a professor of religion at
Emory University in Atlanta. She teaches the Holocaust and
has made a special study of what she calls "Holocaust
denial."

LIPSTADT: It is a very dangerous force, but it is not a
clear and present danger, to borrow a phrase from American
legal parlance. It is a clear and future danger. It's when
there are no longer people around, and there are people in
this room who could say this, who could say, this is my
story, this is what happened to me. Then I think the deniers
will do what they want to do in an even stronger
fashion.

GLASS: In 1993, Lipstadt's book, "Denying the Holocaust,"
came out in the United States. In it, she wrote that David
Irving bends historic evidence, quote, "until it confirms
with his ideological leanings and political agenda." She
added that he has become "a Holocaust denier."

IRVING: Oh, it's a very useful charge, but it's a killer
charge. Anybody who's a Holocaust denier is finished, he's
floating face-down dead in the water.

GLASS: Irving, who says he's a dissident, not a denier,
did not sue her in the United States, where American law
places a heavy burden on the plaintiff. After the
publishers, Penguin, released Lipstadt's book in Great
Britain in 1995, Irving filed suit. British libel law gives
more advantages to the plaintiff than does American law.

DON GUTENPLAN (ph), JOURNALIST: In England, she has to
prove that what she said about him was true.

GLASS: Don Gutenplan is a journalist writing a book about
Irving versus Lipstadt.

GUTENPLAN: In this case, what he's done is kind of use
the libel law as a kind of jujitsu to force her to prove not
only that what she said about him is true, but since she
says that his views about the Holocaust are nonsensical, she
has to prove that they're nonsensical.

GLASS: When Lipstadt and Irving arrived at the British
high court last week, they were prepared to argue the
history of the last century for the next two to three
months.

(on camera): David Irving is asking an English court to
vindicate his reputation as a historian. Inevitably, the
stakes are higher. A judge will have to decide something
much more important: the truth about history.

IRVING: This is my secret weapon.

GLASS (voice-over): David Irving is representing himself.
His legal experience includes convictions and fines for what
he has said about the Holocaust in France and Germany. He
has sued newspapers for libel. And Otto Frank once took
Irving's publisher to court for what Irving wrote about his
doctor Anne Frank, the Dutch-Jewish girl who died in a
concentration camp.

(on camera): Did you say that the Anne Frank diary was a
forgery?

IRVING: Guilty.

GLASS: Is it a forgery?

IRVING: No.

GLASS (voice-over): Deborah Lipstadt is represented in
court by a high powered legal team that includes Princess
Diana's former divorce lawyer. They have advised her not to
testify in court or to be interviewed by CNN & TIME. ADL
director Abraham Foxman is a Holocaust survivor who was
surprised that a court should weigh evidence about an event
he lived.

FOXMAN: I just find it so offensive and ludicrous that it
needs to be established in a court of law, but, you know, if
that's where we are, that's where we are.

GLASS: By suing Lipstadt in Britain, Irving said he was
trying to discredit other critics beyond the reach of the
British courts. The ADL successfully lobbied Irving's
American publisher in 1996 to cancel publication of his
biography of Nazi propaganda Joseph Goebbels.

IRVING: There was a conspiracy to defame me.

GLASS: Irving says he is suing because the critics have
deprived him of his livelihood and violated his right to
free speech. Even in Britain, he can no longer find a
mainstream publisher, and publishes his books himself.

(on camera): Do you believe in a Jewish conspiracy
against you?

IRVING: There has been an organized attempt by
international Jewish organizations to destroy my career and
my legitimacy. I think a court would define that as a
conspiracy.

GLASS (voice-over): David Irving grew up in Britain
during and just after World War II. He dropped out of his
university and went to work in a steel factory in
Germany.

IRVING: It took me some time to learn German properly, to
get to know the Germans.

GLASS: At the steel works, Irving met a survivor of the
1945 Allied bombardment of Dresden, who told him how the
British air force had devastated the ancient city.

In 1963, Irving's first book, "The Destruction of
Dresden," launched a broadside against the British for what
Irving called an unnecessary holocaust of innocent German
civilians. The Dresden book opened doors in Germany to
Hitler's inner circle. One was Dr. Irwin Gesing (ph), who
had treated Hitler after the failed bomb attempt on his life
in 1944. Gesing gave Irving his diary and told him to turn
to page 340.

IRVING: There was a conversation between Hitler and
himself in August 1944, which ends up with Adolf Hitler
telling Dr. Gesing, "Nobody will ever judge me properly, not
this generation, it'll have to be the next generation, it'll
have to be an Englishman, it'll have to be an Englishman who
knows the German archives and an Englishman who can speak
the German language fluently."

GLASS (on camera): Was there a danger for you that you
would not only be a historian and an observer of the circle,
but might become a part of it?

IRVING: A part of it. I appreciate what you're saying and
it's a very difficult position, of course. You meet the
people on an individual basis and you listen to them, but
you try never to forget your duty.

GLASS (voice-over): In 1977, Irving published "Hitler's
War," acclaimed by many historians, the book prompted
critics to accuse Irving of being too sympathetic to Hitler.
One wrote it was the autobiography Hitler didn't write.

(on camera): Do you admire Adolf Hitler?

IRVING: What a strange question. As a soldier, yes.
Unquestionably he fought some major battles and won them
against the advice of his generals. But on the other hand,
what about his moral qualifications? There I have to
equivocate and say that he's on the same pedestal as Joe
Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Truman. To my mind -- and
I may be wrong -- but to my mind, each of these five
executed crimes against humanity, against innocent
populations that would justify the label of war
criminal.

GLASS (voice-over): Irving says there is no document
proving that Hitler himself ordered the genocide of the Jews
and has offered $1,000 to anybody who provides one.

CESARANI: A good historian knows that in many cases there
isn't a single document, that you have to answer the
questions in more sophisticated and subtle ways than
that.

GLASS: In 1988, David Irving testified on behalf of a
self- confessed Holocaust denier, Ernst Zundel, in a
Canadian court. Zundel stood accused of promoting racial
hatred with propaganda that Jews were lying about the Nazi
death camps.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm not a Nazi sympathizer, or a
revisionist, or a right winger, or anything else.

GLASS: Irving said the testimony of another witness,
American Fred Leuchter, who had taken samples of bricks from
Auschwitz and had them analyzed in the U.S. for cyanide,
caused him to doubt the Jews had been gassed at the
Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.

IRVING: The later report wasn't the only reason, of
course, but I -- it caused me to rethink, made me sit down
and think to myself, well, is there any evidence? And the
answer is, no.

GLASS: The Canadian judge ruled that Fred Leuchter had no
expertise. But David Irving published Leuchter's report and
wrote a foreword. The report contradicts the testimony of
thousands of survivors and important documentary
evidence.

CESARANI: We now have in the Moscow archives the building
plans, the orders for the gas chamber and crematory
equipment. This is not to mention the sworn statements taken
by Nazis in captivity at the end of the second world war,
and of course, the mass of statements by the survivors.

GLASS: Lipstadt's attorneys are making an issue of
Irving's denial that the Nazis murdered as many as 6 million
Jews. IRVING: I would guilty of questioning the statistics.
I think that the figures that we are now told have been
inflated.

GLASS: Irving acknowledges that the Nazis murdered up to
a million people with machine guns on the eastern front and
another 50,000 at Auschwitz, far fewer than most other
historians. And he equates both morally and in terms of
numbers, deaths under the Nazi extermination program and
those caused by the Allied air bombardment of German
cities.

IRVING: Somebody who's trying to quantify the size of the
crime. It matters, because if it was a million people who
were killed in the Holocaust, then we burned a million
people with the bombing, which makes us as bad as the
Nazis.

GLASS: Many survivors and critics are offended that
Irving dismisses the eyewitness testimony of Holocaust
survivors, while relying on the word of victims of the
Dresden bombing.

IRVING: Calling it a double standard is a bit harsh, but
I think it's a fair point to make.

GLASS: Abraham Foxman accepts Irving's right to be, in
his opinion, a bigot. Survivors may be insulted, he says,
but Irving and others have made them bear witness to what
happened.

FOXMAN: It stimulated survivors who were silent to all of
a sudden to bear testimony, to tell the story, because so
offended were they that there would be not a few a
individuals, crackpots, but there would be a movement, that
it would start appearing on college campuses, that book were
being published, that platforms were being provided.

GLASS: Irving is taking a gamble. Winning could make him
publishable again; losing might leave him liable to pay
Lipstadt's court costs estimated at over $1 million. The
court could then seize his assets, including his London
flat. And his reputation as a historian would be more
seriously battered.

IRVING: I'm interested to see if in this coming trial
here in London they find the documents and they produce them
to the satisfaction of this court that do prove me wrong.
And if they prove me wrong, I'll smile sheepishly and say,
well, well done, fellows. It's taken you 40 years.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SHAW: The case of Irving versus Lipstadt is expected to
take up to three months. In his opening statement, Irving
said he had made important contributions to the world's
understanding of the Holocaust. The defense countered with
quotes from books and speeches in which Irving exonerated
Hitler and called Auschwitz, quote, "baloney." The defense
also branded Irving a liar.